Rag Doll Watermelon Summer Dress

While I've never found any patterns specific for this doll I have found many of the dress patterns that will fit the Lots to Love 14 Inch Baby Doll and the JC 16 Inch Baby doll can be adapted to fit the Rag doll as well.

The dress pattern come from a 1981 House of White Birches newsprint leaflet Baby Doll Fashions to Crochet by Margaret Funk. I used this previously to make 2 dresses for the 16 inch baby doll donation. It required a few additional adaptations for the Rag doll.

Notes:

This outfit was made with Lion Brand Ice Cream Yarn Watermelon. I have a bunch of Ice Cream yarn in my stash for doll blankets and I've been using some for the larger doll projects. I wasn't sure at first how the colors would work with watermelon as the previous Ice Cream Yarn I used for the other dolls had different kinds of contrasts. However, I really do love the look of this for the Rag Doll and would use it again.

As with the 16 Inch Baby Doll I started with an E hook and repeated row 5 once. Thus rows 3-6 follow the original directions for 3-5 moving each row directions down one. For the original row 6 now row 7 that starts the skirt I moved to a D hook to decrease the skirt size as it was too large with the e hook.

The body is a little smaller than the 16 inch Baby doll and thus a few reductions had to be made. I did this by adding a row to the top of the dress and decreasing around the arms. I did the same around the arms, using sc for both tasks. This decreased the open areas of the dress which were a little too big for the Rag Doll.